FOR ARMENİAN DİLEMMA FAQ's

“… The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his passion for plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be a negligible thorn in the Ottoman side did he stand alone.

The Porte knows very well that while Armenian Christians are Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, each sect bitterly intolerant of the others and moreover while commerce and usury are all in Armenian hands, it can divide and rule secure; but behind the Armenian secret societies (and there are few Armenians who have not committed technical treason by becoming members of such societies at some point of their lives) it sees the Kurd, and behind the Kurd the Russian; or looking west, it espies through the ceaseless sporadic propaganda of the agitators Exeter Hall and Armenian Committees.

The Turk begins to repress because we sympathize and we sympathize because he represses and so the vicious circle revolves. Does he habitually, however, do more than repress? Does he, as administrator oppress? So far we have heard one version only, one part to this suit, with its stories of outrage and echoing through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth of the accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom, by the gulf of misunderstanding which is fixed between the Christian and the Moslem.

In my own experience of western Armenia, extending more or less over four years up to 1894, I have seen no signs of a Reign of Terror. Life in Christian villages has not shown itself outwardly to me as being very different from life in the villages of Islam, nor the trade and property of Armenians in towns to be less secure than those of Moslems. There was tension, there was friction, there was a condition of mutual suspicion as to which Armenians have said to me again and again "If only the patriots would leave us to trade and to till!".

The Turk rules by right of five hundred years' possession, and before his day the Byzantine, the Persian, the Parthian, the Roman preceded each other as over-lords of Greater Armenia back to the misty days of the first Tigranes.

The Turk claims certain rights in this matter - the right to safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such hornets' nests as Zeitun, which has annihilated for centuries past the trade of Eastern Taurus, the right to remain dominant by all means not outrageous …”
2.2 David G. Hogarth, A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, New York, 1896, p 147